1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus including a removable storage device, and a method of controlling the apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there have been image forming apparatuses that perform sufficient cooling or periodic cleaning for maintaining high-speed and high-precision printing quality.
Further, there have been image forming apparatuses comprising a hard disk drive (HDD) that serves as a rewritable storage device. Such an image forming apparatus stores, in the HDD, data for starting up an operating system (OS). The HDD is used not only at the time of start-up, but also at the time of temporary storage of image data or storage of user data. Moreover, there have been image forming apparatuses having a mechanism (removable mechanism) for enabling a user to remove a HDD from a main bode of the apparatus, for a case where highly confidential user data is stored in the HDD.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-262065 discloses a power supply control method of a HDD in an image forming apparatus including a HDD.
In the conventional image forming apparatus, there are following problems. When a user attempts to remove a removable storage device, if an image forming apparatus is performing processing with the use of data stored in the removable storage device, the user is unable to remove the removable storage device until the processing ends. If the processing is forcibly terminated, the storage device can be immediately removed. However, such a forcible termination of the processing causes another problem. For instance, in a case where processing such as cooling or cleaning is being performed, if the processing is forcibly terminated, performance of the image forming apparatus or quality of formed images deteriorates. Meanwhile, because the processing uses data stored in the storage device, the processing cannot be performed again after the storage device is removed.